The Shrinking Microblogging Market
This week, Google announced they were stopping development on Jaiku and releasing it as an open source project maintained by volunteers. This follows just a month after Pownce was bought by Six Apart...
View ArticleWinning Ways to Promote Your Blog Contest
Blog contests and giveaways are a popular way to increase traffic. The most common blog giveaway is to simply announce it on one’s site and ask people to enter by posting a comment. You can build an...
View ArticlePreparing For an Extended Absence From Your Blog
Any day now, my wife will give birth to our first child. We’re doing our best to be prepared, even though we realize this is an event for which we can never fully prepare. I think we’ve gone through...
View ArticleTips For Writing an Excellent Tutorial
One of the most difficult tasks — for me, at least — is teaching someone else how to do something. It’s a problem of assumptions, I think. When you know how to do something yourself, it’s easy to leave...
View ArticleHow to Be Your Company’s Microblogging Evangelist
When I started my current full-time job at a media company, there were a few people there trying out Twitter, but only a couple of us using it regularly. Now, a year later, most of the people in my...
View ArticleQuestions to Ask When Writing a Review
Some of my first blog posts were music reviews. At least, that was the intent. I’m not a particularly critical person and my music knowledge is limited, so the posts came off more as bad comedy then...
View ArticleIntenseDebate Adds Plugin Support
The hosted comments market is definitely heating up. Part of it is blog owners wanting some control over who comments without requiring visitors to create yet another login. A bigger part, I think, is...
View ArticleMovable Type Motion: Bringing Social Networks Back to Your Site
These days, many companies are devoting full time resources to monitoring and participating in social networks. As social sites grow in both size and quantity, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep...
View ArticleTaking the Common Sense Approach to Twittering About Your Job
A recent article on MSN discussed how twittering can get you fired. Personally, I thought the story exaggerated the risks. The reporter didn’t find anyone that had actually been fired. She did find...
View ArticleHuffington Post Announces Investigative Journalism Fund
Seems like everyday there’s another story about a newspaper downsizing, going online only, or shutting its doors completely. It’s not particularly surprising: Online readership is growing while paper...
View ArticleEasy Blog Post Versioning with Dropbox
For me, the biggest part of writing is rewriting. A first draft is pretty easy to knock out, but the revising and refining are the real work. And more than once I’ve finished about the eighth revision...
View ArticleTwitshirt: A False Start With Lots of Potential
You might not think a lot of wit can be stuffed into 140 characters, but most of the people I follow on Twitter inject a fair amount of humor into their updates. Some of them post clever jokes almost...
View ArticleDo You Make Your Living Blogging?
That’s really the dream for a lot of us, isn’t it? To walk away from the 9-5 job and be able to make ends meet with our blog(s)? According to this article in the Wall Street Journal, almost half a...
View ArticleBlogging Reviews, Part 2: Organizing Your Review
A few weeks ago, I wrote about some questions you should ask when writing a review. I wanted to follow-up that post with some tips for how to format your review. A well-structured review can keep the...
View ArticleBlogging For A Cause
One of the things I’ve always liked about the blogging community is how quickly they’re willing to step up and help in times of need. Whether it’s organizing disaster relief, calling for the release of...
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